The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [334]
Montunnas flew above, watching Castro’s forces capture men he had brought out of hiding. He felt no better than a Judas sheep. There were many sailors, from admirals to swabs, who felt the same way: that they had led the Cuban brigade to slaughter. “We were all pretty well disgusted,” Montunnas reflected forty years later. “We could have stopped that Cuban operation cold if they’d just turned us loose. I had the feeling that the Kennedy administration was gutless. They got the brigade in that predicament, and they let them hang out to dry.”
These Americans had been trained to fight their nation’s wars, and they felt they had been prevented from doing so by Kennedy. They said nothing, and they wore their uniforms with ramrod pride, but they carried within them feelings that would grow in the next few years, feelings of devastating consequence to America in the next decade. Craven politicians were holding America’s brave men back, preventing them from fighting against communism the way they believed they must fight. And America’s soldiers were bearing the onus of defeat, not the men in Washington who were its architects.
By the end of the week Kennedy was, in Bobby’s words, “more upset this time than he was any other.” In public he stood and accepted blame, but privately he mused about those who had let him down, blaming everyone but himself. The president blamed Bowles and what he considered the other limp-wristed, effete diplomats at the State Department, though Rusk’s worst sin was not in being wrong but in speaking his doubts only in quiet tones. Kennedy blamed the “fucking brass hats,” though the Joint Chiefs had given realistic appraisals of the military prospects based on what the CIA had told them. Kennedy seemed to place less blame on the CIA, which had masterminded the operation, though more likely he had decided not to alienate the agency. When Dulles arrived, his shoulders slumped despondently, Kennedy buttressed the CIA chieftain by putting his arm around him, a gesture he did not make to Rusk or the Joint Chiefs.
The two Kennedy brothers walked back from the East Room together after the president had taken public responsibility for the debacle. “Let’s go in and call Dad,” Bobby said. “Let’s see if he can find something good about this.”
That was the role Joe had always had. No matter how grievous the problem, how deep the tragedy, how intractable the dilemma, they could turn to their father and he would find some way to bolster them. “This is the best thing you’ve done,” he told the president. “A person that takes responsibility, the American people love you. A person that’s going to be responsible and accountable, you’re going to find out you did real well.”
The public opinion polls showed that the president was more popular than ever, the irony of which Kennedy was perfectly aware. He had said during the invasion that he was going ahead because “he’d rather be called an aggressor than a bum,” and now he was being called both. The papers were merciless in their vivisection of the debacle, roundly condemning Kennedy for duplicity while endlessly repeating the details of the military humiliation.
On Friday evening, April 21, Kennedy might have found more fruitful uses of his time than watching the CBS Evening News, but he had to understand how the story was playing. He and Bobby stood in the family room a few feet in front of the television set. They watched a gesticulating, triumphant Castro standing beside twisted, smoking, unrecognizable wreckage. It was too soon for CBS to have film of